Disappointed, and highly indignant, we called again the next day upon that manager of the employment agency. He was profoundly apologetic, and said that he happened to have waiting in another room a young lady who was exactly what we wanted. She was immediately asked into the private office, where Mrs. Maxim and I examined her. She was about twenty-five years of age, and was, as they say down in Maine, as smart as a steel trap. I gave her a dictation replete with multi-syllabic terminology, and with unusual words of difficult orthography, but she took down everything with lightning speed, read back her notes to perfection, and transcribed them rapidly on the typewriter without a mistake.
We asked for what salary she would be willing to come to us. The salary asked was pretty high, but we instantly agreed to pay it. The manager and the young lady exchanged glances, and both looked a bit surprised. Mrs. Maxim and I then asked if we might talk with the young lady alone for a few minutes.
After some Sherlock Holmesy talk with the young woman, Mrs. Maxim and I came to the conclusion that she was a show girl kept by the manager merely to prove that he had the goods when required, provided anyone wished to pay a sufficiently high salary, and the salary was made high enough to deter most applicants. We got it from the girl that she had several times been hired and had worked a few days for each of a number of employers, until she could find some rational excuse for breaking away and returning to the agency, the manager of which, we also learned, was her brother, and she was a partner in the business.
The incident reminded me of a story told by a friend of mine in New York who bought a beautiful and highly trained Scotch terrier of a Broadway dog vendor, thinking that after keeping the dog tied up for a week, feeding him and treating him with kindness, he could be depended upon to stay with his new master, but the moment the dog was freed he disappeared, and the next day he was again with his master, the dog vendor, ready to be resold. Some time later, a light was thrown upon the inner consciousness of my friend by reading an account in the newspapers of the arrest of the dog vendor for obtaining money under false pretenses and practicing fraud in the sale of dogs, or rather, of the dog. The canine was a sort of homing-pigeon dog, trained, like a carrier pigeon, to return from each new master as soon as freed. The buying and selling of that one dog constituted the main business of the scamp.